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Applying PnP Templates to SharePoint Sites

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In this page, you can find detailed information about how to manually provision a look book template on your tenant.

You can also follow these steps by watching this video on the Microsoft 365 Platform Community (PnP) YouTube Channel:

Software prerequisites

In order to provision the look book templates, you need to have the following software tools installed on your machine:

Once the above tools are installed, you can proceed with the following sections.

Note

The PnP Provisioning Framework & PnP Provisioning Engine are open-source solutions with active community providing support for it. There is no SLA for the open-source tool support from Microsoft.

Available templates

The look book templates are based on the PnP Provisioning engine. As such, every single template is a .pnp (pnp stands for Patterns & Practices) file, which is nothing more than an OpenXML file that includes all the needed content to deploy the template. Here follows a table where you can find the list of all the look book templates, a link do download the corresponding .pnp template file, the configuration parameters, and the prerequisites.

Category Template Site Type Parameters Prerequisites
Organization Leadership Connection Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
The Perspective Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Crisis Communications Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
News site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
The Landing Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Benefits Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Hispanic Heritage Month Employee Resource Group Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Department Retail Operations Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Fly Safe Conference Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Global sales hub Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
  • RetailOperationsSiteTitle
  • RetailOperationsSiteUrl
  • ConsumerRetailSiteTitle
  • ConsumerRetailSiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Workshop training site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Global marketing hub Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
  • CommunicationSiteTitle
  • CommunicationSiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Human resources hub Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
  • BenefitsSiteTitle
  • BenefitsSiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Team Collaboration team site Modern Team Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteAlias
 SharePoint Online Admin
Team communication site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Mark8 Project Team Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Product Support Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Community Branding Site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Charitable site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Solutions Microsoft 365 learning pathways Communication Site
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin, App Catalog
New employee departmental onboarding site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Workplace Transformation site Communication Site
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
New employee pre-onboarding site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
New employee corporate onboarding site Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
Microsoft 365 freelance communications site Communication Site
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin
SharePoint Success Site Communication Site
  • SiteUrl
 SharePoint Online Admin, App Catalog
Schools School home page Communication Site
  • SiteTitle
  • SiteUrl
 Regular user
Staff home page Team Site
  • SiteUrl
 Regular user
Class home page Team Site
  • SiteUrl
 Regular user

Here follows a brief guidance about the parameters:

  • SiteTitle: is the title that is provisioned on the target site.
  • SiteUrl: is the server-relative URL of the site provisioned by the template. It can be something like: /sites/name-of-the-site.
  • RetailOperationsSiteTitle: is the title of the Communication Site provisioned on the target tenant for the Global Sales Hub template.
  • RetailOperationsSiteUrl: is the server-relative URL of the Retail Operations Communication Site provisioned by the template Global Sales Hub. It can be something like: /sites/name-of-the-site.
  • ConsumerRetailSiteTitle: is the title of the Retail Operations Communication Site provisioned on the target tenant for the Global Sales Hub template.
  • ConsumerRetailSiteUrl: is the server-relative URL of the Consumer Retail Communication Site provisioned by the template Global Sales Hub. It can be something like: /sites/name-of-the-site.
  • CommunicationSiteTitle: is the title of the Consumer Retail Communication Site provisioned on the target tenant for the Global Marketing Hub template.
  • CommunicationSiteUrl: is the server-relative URL of the Communication Site provisioned by the template Global Marketing Hub. It can be something like: /sites/name-of-the-site.
  • BenefitsSiteTitle: is the title of the Communication Site provisioned by the Human Resources Hub template.
  • BenefitsSiteUrl: is the server-relative URL of the Communication Site provisioned by the Human Resources Hub template. It can be something like: /sites/name-of-the-site.

Here follows a brief guidance about the meaning of the prerequisites:

  • SharePoint Online Admin: you need to execute the provisioning using a user who is member of the SharePoint Online Administrators group.
  • App Catalog: you need to have a fully functional tenant-wide App Catalog in your target tenant, and you need to execute the provisioning using a user who has admin access to the App Catalog site.
  • Regular user: you can execute the provisioning with a regular user of SharePoint Online.

Note: If you don't have the App Catalog configured in your tenant, and the template that you are willing to provision requires the App Catalog, you can follow the instructions provided in this online document.

Provisioning a template

In order to execute the actual provisioning, you need to execute a PowerShell cmdlet provided by the PnP PowerShell extensions.

Provisioning templates that require a SharePoint Online Admin

Download the .PNP template file that you want to provision, save it in a local folder, and run the following PowerShell command:

Connect-PnPOnline https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<URL-of-your-target-site> -Interactive

Invoke-PnPTenantTemplate -Path .\your-template-file.pnp -Parameters @{"SiteTitle"="<Title-of-your-target-site>";"SiteUrl"="/sites/<URL-of-your-target-site>"}

Replace <tenant> with the actual name of your SharePoint Online tenant in Microsoft 365. Remember to provide a value for all the parameters declared in the above table.

Important: The very first time that you will connect to your target environment using the Connect-PnPOnline command let, you will have to grant a set of permissions to the PnP Management Shell application.

Provisioning templates that require a Regular User

Download the .PNP template file that you want to provision, save it in a local folder, and run the following PowerShell command:

Connect-PnPOnline https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<URL-of-your-target-site> -Interactive

Invoke-PnPSiteTemplate -Path .\your-template-file.pnp -Parameters @{"SiteTitle"="<Title-of-your-target-site>";"SiteUrl"="/sites/<URL-of-your-target-site>"}

Replace <tenant> with the actual name of your SharePoint Online tenant in Microsoft 365. Remember to provide a value for all the parameters declared in the above table.

Example script for applying Learning Pathways solution

This is how the PowerShell script would look for applying the Learning Pathways solution, which only has the SiteUrl parameter and the pnp file for the Learning Pathways is located in the c:\temp folder and you want to target to a previously created site with URL of /sites/M365LP.

Connect-PnPOnline https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<URL-of-your-target-site>

Invoke-PnPSiteTemplate -Path c:\temp\M365LP.pnp -Parameters @{"SiteUrl"="/sites/M365LP"}

Next Steps

Now that the look book template is provisioned on your tenant, feel free to browse to the site URL that you selected and play with the new site.

If there's any issue, don't hesitate to file an issue in the PnP Provisioning Service repository on GitHub.